Entangled Subjects : Indigenous/Australian Cross-Cultures Of Talk, Text, And Modernity
Netherlands
:
Rodopi
,
2013
Z1938856
2013
single work
criticism
'Indigenous Australian cultures were long known to the world mainly from the writing of anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, missionaries, and others. Indigenous Australians themselves have worked across a range of genres to challenge and reconfigure this textual legacy, so that they are now strongly represented through their own life-narratives of identity, history, politics, and culture. Even as Indigenous-authored texts have opened up new horizons of engagement with Aboriginal knowledge and representation, however, the textual politics of some of these narratives - particularly when cross-culturally produced or edited - can remain haunted by colonially grounded assumptions about orality and literacy.
Through an examination of key moments in the theorizing of orality and literacy and key texts in cross-culturally produced Indigenous life-writing, Entangled Subjects explores how some of these works can sustain, rather than trouble, the frontier zone established by modernity in relation to 'talk' and 'text'. Yet contemporary Indigenous vernaculars offer radical new approaches to how we might move beyond the orality-literacy 'frontier', and how modernity and the a-modern are productively entangled in the process. ' (Source: Angus & Robertson website www.angusrobertson.com.au)
When Mary Ann Hughes complained in 1998 that critics were preoccupied with the process of editorial collaboration that shaped Australian Aboriginal texts, she argued that this focus led to the neglect of the literary merit of the work. While the collaboration of mainstream writers with editors primarily went unremarked, “in the case of an Aboriginal writer, the role of the editor in constructing the work is the issue which most readily springs to the fore.” Hughes remarked upon the then decade-long critical determination to materialize the traditionally invisible craft of editing. This critical preoccupation ran parallel with the second wave of Aboriginal life writing (Brewster, 44), which witnessed the transformation of Aboriginal publishing from marginal to mainstream, reaching beyond the local to global audiences (Haag, 12). The exponential increase in the publication of Aboriginal life writing was accompanied by the politicization of publication processes, including coproduction, that have conventionally been kept from public view. (Introduction)
Cross Talk : Collaborative Indigenous Life Writing in Australia and Canada
2004
Z1351079
2004
single work
thesis
This thesis provides a comparative analysis of collaborative Indigenous life writing texts produced in Australia and Canada. Drawing on the large body of Indigenous life writing texts produced in both countries, the critical and theoretical literature surrounding these texts, and twenty-nine interviews conducted during the course of research with participants in Aboriginal and First Nations collaborative life writing, the author argues that literary criticism needs to take into account the co-operative basis of textual production as well as the constraining factors that shape the outcome of collaborative texts. Further, he argues for the importance of non-Indigenous critics acknowledging the centrality of Indigenous protocols in both the production and reception of collaborative Indigenous life writing. The thesis is based upon the premise that readers and producers of collaborative Indigenous life writing texts can and should talk to each other and that each group can benefit from such cross talk.
